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Considerations for Managing Classic Approval Processes
Keep these things in mind when maintaining existing classic approval processes—including activating and deleting them.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
Important Try Flow
Approval Processes, a modern alternative to Classic Approval Processes. This new
feature provides a more flexible, user-friendly flow-based interface, and it can trigger on
record changes, supporting Apex extensibility and detailed logging for compliance and audit
trails. It supports dynamic routing based on data and business rules, unlike Classic Approval
Processes, which are tied to specific objects and offer limited support for processes by using
conditions. With Flow Approval Processes, you can monitor submitted records and quickly
identify bottlenecks, giving you unprecedented visibility into approval workflows. And, like
Classic Approval Processes, Flow Approval Processes don’t consume automation credits or
orchestration runs.
Admin Permissions
Users with one of these permissions are considered approval admins.
- Modify All Records object-level permission for the given object
- Modify All Data user permission
Approval admins can:
- Approve or reject pending approval requests without being part of the classic approval process
- Edit records that have been locked for approval
Activating Approval Processes
- A classic approval process must have at least one step before you can activate it.
- Before you activate your classic approval process, test it in your Salesforce sandbox.
- After a classic approval process is activated, you can’t add, delete, or change the order of the steps or change its reject or skip behavior, even if the process is inactive.
Monitoring In-Flight Classic Approval Processes
Standard reports for approval requests are included in both the Administrative Reports folder and the Activity Reports folder.
Deploying over Existing Classic Approval Processes
When you deploy a classic approval process with no entry criteria to overwrite an existing classic approval process with entry criteria, then the entry criteria from the existing process are applied to the deployed process.
Deleting Classic Approval Processes
Before you delete a classic approval process:
- Make sure it’s inactive.
- Delete all approval requests that are associated with it, and remove them from the Recycle Bin.
- Delete all records, for example, accounts that were submitted through the approval process regardless of status. By deleting the records, the associated ProcessInstanceWorkitem and ProcessInstance records are also deleted automatically.
- If you can't delete the classic approval process, try again after 2 days. Salesforce can take up to 2 days to delete the files that you removed from the recycle bin.
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